Week #8: Virtual Book Tour

In the last 7 days, I’ve had almost zero hours of sleep… no, just kidding (kinda).

Since it went live, it’s been a little crazy. We were up all night the night before the launch getting the funnel ready. Then we were we up early in the morning working up until the minute it went live.

And boy, oh boy, did it go live! On the first day, we sold over 10,000 copies of the book. And in the first seven days we sold 22,673 copies.

To put that into perspective, it took us over a month to do that with the Dot Com Secrets Book (and I was giving away a Ferrari).

The coolest thing about this launch is how many people are promoting it without really any expectation of anything in return. They just want to help me get the message out. I am truly humbled by and grateful for this.

After Launch Day, our next phase was moving onto the Virtual Book Tour.

So what is a Virtual Book Tour?

Well, in the “real world” when authors write books they will go on Jimmy Kimmel, the Today Show, Good Morning America, and all these other shows to promote their book.

So I thought it’d be kind of cool to do the same thing. So we found a bunch of influencers in multiple different markets. People whom I had relationships with and liked. We did Facebook Lives to their audiences.

We had almost 100 people lined up to do Facebook Lives with. So because of that, each interview only lasted about 10 minutes. This is comparable to what you would get on a TV talk show, so I thought that would be fine.

So I had them all lined up, and every 20 minutes, we would have the next one.

The problem we ran into was it always took 2-3 minutes to get everyone set up and working. Then we’d do the 10 minute interview which almost always stretched into 15 or 20 minutes. This meant the next interview was starting while I was still live with the other person.

I’ve never been good at just cutting people off. I felt so grateful and honored that they had me on their fan page that I didn’t want to cut it off.

So it was a little stressful going from interview to interview.

We had a couple hiccups throughout. Twice, the internet at the office died. We had to race home to do interviews there. We had a couple other minor hiccups as well, but for most part it went really well and were instrumental to our success in selling over 22,000 copies during the first 7 days.

One cool twist we added to this:

Not only did we do a Facebook Live to their audience… and not only did we hope that they would promote it to their audience… we actually paid to boost the Facebook Lives. So we covered the cost. All they had to do was do the Facebook Lives and we’re covering the costs to sell books for them.

On top of that, we have tons of amazing affiliates promoting. In fact, you can see, as of today, here’s our Top 10 list of promoters:

Once again, I’m so grateful for the literally hundreds of people who’ve helped us to promote the book.

For any of you who haven’t read the book yet, now is the time! Go to ExpertSecrets.com to get your free copy.

What’s Next?

A couple things looking back on the last 7 days…

During the first seven days after the launch I didn’t want to make any drastic changes to the funnel.

Honestly, the people that come to the funnel initially are my most excited fans and followers. Because of that, they totally screw up our conversion stats and numbers. A lot of these people will buy two or three copies of my book just so they can funnel hack my funnel. Some buy the upsells, some don’t. So all my numbers are skewed, so I didn’t want to make any rash decisions until after all my hyper-active buyers had a chance to buy the book.

Now that the week’s out, I’m starting to see the trending lines of where our conversion rates land with a “warm” audience (i.e. people who may not be familiar with me but are interested in the topic). What I’ve seen over the last seven days as we transition to the warm traffic phase is that our average cart value dropped from about $35 down to around $26.

So what is the Average Cart Value? This is the metric that drives everything in a book funnel (and honestly in all funnels). The Average Cart Value measures how much, on average, each person who buys the book spends during that cart session.

So for every free book we give away, we were averaging $35 in sales. Now, as the hot markets are drifting away and given way to the folks in warm markets, that average cart value has dropped to $26.

$26 is still not bad. It means I can spend up to $26 to sell a free book and still be profitable. This is not that difficult to do and even gives us the ability to pay affiliates really well. The problem is I know as we move from warm traffic to cold traffic, those numbers will continue to go down. I will need to keep them steady.

So my goal is to try to get our ACV back up to the $30-$40 range.

So what is the plan to do that?

Well, next week I’ll show you the new funnel and the new stats.

Basically, we’re doing a bunch of split tests on the order form bump copy. We’re changing the upsell offer and we position it. We’re also adding an Upsell #2 which is a new course I put together that I think will help streamline most people’s success and also increase our average cart value.

I’m also planning on changing the first follow up funnel. I took my Funnel Hacks webinar and broke it up into five videos over five days. While it’s performing pretty well, it’s not even performing close to what an automated or live webinar does. So this week we’re planning on switching that out for an automated webinar.

So those are some of the changes we’re planning. If we can get to the point where we’re averaging $35-$40 per sale, especially with warm and cold traffic, we’ll have something we can infinitely scale.

So that’s the game plan for this week. I’m excited to keep sharing this journey with you.

One Other Cool Thing…

Most of our ads have been focused on promoting the Facebook Lives but we’ve also had some good success with some retargeting ads.

In fact, here is a picture of one of our ads:

Right now, this retargeting ad is selling for about $2.07 per book. So this retargeting is getting people to come back and buy the book which is exciting.

Anyways, that’s it for this week. We’ll keep selling books and I’ll fill you in on the details next week.

Who is Russell Brunson?

Over the past 10 years, Russell has built a following of over a million entrepreneurs, sold hundreds of thousands of copies of his books, popularized the concept of sales funnels, and co-founded a software company called ClickFunnels that helps tens of thousands of entrepreneurs quickly get their message out to the marketplace.